Neal Horsley

Otis O'Neal Horsley
Neal Horsley
Alma mater	Westminster Theological Seminary
Home Base	Carollton, GA
Address	218 Farmington Trce, Carollton, GA 30116-1863
Phone	(770)214-0126
AKA	"Cowboy Neal"
Published By	OPP HQ
Published On	13 March 2004

On March 29, 2001 a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a verdict that ruled wanted posters of abortion providers and personal information found on a website called the Nuremberg Files was protected free speech. That gave Neal Horsley, the author of the site, the freedom to promote that information even with the threat of lawlessness against those providers.

The thing is, the ruling also gave the freedom to the rest of us. If anyone asks what prompted One People's Project to put out public information on the assorted fascists and right-wingers we have to deal with, we always refer to this guy. The freedoms they allow for themselves they allow for us, and we are putting them on notice:

   Any move they make will be matched and surpassed.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has uncovered a lot of interesting information about Mr. Horsley, and it is an interesting thing that someone who has expressed a belief in violent acts against people who do not do what he views as God's will could actually have been his own victim. He was raised in Bowden, Georgia. His father died four months before he was born, and he did not have the greatest childhood in the world, as evidenced by him starting to drink at age 15. He spent some time in the military during Vietnam, but there isn't any evidence that he was served in that conflict. In fact, he became an anti-war activist and moved to San Francisco. That also meant getting into the hippie and drug culture full on ("smoking dope, fucking and boozing, that's who I am naturally," he once said), and getting into that meant becoming a marijuana dealer when he returned to Georgia two years later.

During this time, the SPLC says that the then-skirt-chasing Horsley had begged two women he had impregnated to get abortions, which at the time would have been illegal (he says they never did). Also this year he married a 16-year-old runaway named Carol and the couple moved to Athens, Ga. In 1971 Horsley was enrolled at the University of Georgia, but two years later he was charged and convicted for possession of three gallons of hashish oil with intent to distribute. That landed him 30-months in prison, and according to him that led him to the prison ministry of the Watergate felon Chuck Colson. He started doing work with Colson's group, becoming its first southern regional director.

After a stint there, he received a scholarship to attend seminary at the Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. It was there when he began his anti-abortion crusade. Before he graduated in 1985, he was telling his fellow students that the day will come

   "when Christians (are) going to be looking down the barrel of a gun shooting abortionists."

Horsley is the founder (and by most accounts the only member) of something called the Creator's Rights Party. He also started listing the names of abortion providers on his website. On Oct. 23, 1998, the day that abortion doctor Barnett Slepian's was murdered by a sniper in his home, his name was crossed out. That is what put Horsley in the national spotlight. He helps other anti-choicers set up similar websites and defends his on TV regularly. Once he was on Geraldo Rivera's cable show and even implied he would be put on the list. Actually we can go either way on that one.

Horsley doesn't just stop at this point. He also calls for the arrest (and sometimes killing) of homosexuals, as he feels they are "the living embodiment of the death of man." He also uses this and the Bible and even the law to imply the beating death of gay student Matthew Shepard was justified.

   "None of the news reports (on the killing) mention the fact that homosexuality is an illegal activity in the majority of the states of this nation, if not in Wyoming, the State where Shepard was killed," it says on his web page. "There are reasons homosexuality has been outlawed most everywhere in the USA throughout the history of this nation." 

There are also reasons why those laws are being repealed, and Horsley, a man who has boasted about having sex with men and with mules, will have none of that apparently.

Horsley will also have no more of the United States. The Creator's Rights Party is advocating secession from the nation

   "The secession movement advocated by The Creator's Rights Party is no half-baked indulgance in military fantasy but includes within it the power to overrule, if necessary, the government of the United States of America," He writes. 

And how does he plan to do this?

   "The thought of secession via nuclear weapons (our emphasis) must startle intelligent people," he says. 

If ever there was a threatening string of syllables that is it; if ever there was a more powerful recipe for change and, possibly, destruction, it has not been uttered in this generation. For the record, Horsley has worked with the neo-Confederate Southern Party.

In February of 2001, Clayton Waagner, a anti-abortion activist who believed God wanted him to kill abortion doctors, escaped from jail while awaiting sentencing on federal firearms and auto theft convictions. Months later, abortion clinics started receiving letters purporting to be laced with anthrax. According to Horsley, Waagner, who by this time was also wanted for some bank robberies while on the lam, visited his home and had shown him evidence proving he was behind the fake anthrax threats and that he was stalking 42 abortion providers, planning to kill some of them. The reason for visiting Horsley was to ask him to put up some sort of an escape clause for the providers. If they quit, they will be safe. On December 5, workers at a Kinko's near Cincinnati provided a better escape clause. They identified him there, supposedly as he was logged onto one of Horsley's site and notified feds, who arrested him. Horsley in turn, gets face time with all of this.

Today, Horsley does the usual extreme-right circuit and can be seen from time to time on various talking head programs. People come to see and hear him speak at many a function, and of course if they do, we or people associated with us are there finding out who they are. What's good for the goose?